Only a Blockhead

Into the Wild

Into the Wild

I saw this fine movie for a second time, in a theater this time, for it has just had a very late opening in Japan. It's the story of a young man's courageous and uncompromising search for wisdom and truth. This search comes most easily when you are young, unburdened by obligation, and focused on yourself. He was a middle-class kid who graduated college and then left his life and family behind without a word.  His guides were the best: London, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Pasternak. He looked to the wilderness as a place to find the purity that human society lacks.

No matter how careful you are, it must be so difficult to get a movie right: once you've committed the raw material to film there's only so much you can do to revise it. So many films get it wrong. This movie isn't safe, is often audacious, and amazingly it gets it all right: the performances, the construction of the story; the music; the photography; the tone.

The movie faces issues as elemental and crucial as life and death. And, as I watched the last, climactic shots this second time, I felt more clearly that the weight of the piece is finally not on the details of the young man's story, but on the wisdom he attains. For in human existence there is something more important than life/death, and that is--to put it crudely--love. For any work to convey this basic stance on what it is to be human is rare. Sean Penn deserves the highest praise for this superb (in the French sense) realization.

--Julian       

Not Surprisingly

In the morning, not surprisingly, he woke with a headache and an erection.  The erection went away.

--From Final Cut by Daniel Stern

--David

The Eisenhower Blues

The Eisenhower Blues

—NC Tate

The secret practice

Late in the book [A'ida] writes of "a secret practice of women, men, old people, children". "Now consider human lives, their every-minute, every-day lives! Their lives depend upon an agreed regularity to which each contributes. Maintaining this regularity is the forgotten practice I'm talking about. It explains the arrival of the fruit in the market each day, the lights in the street at night, the letters slipped under the front door, the matches in a match box all pointing in the same direction, music heard on the radio, smiles exchanged between strangers. The regularity has a beat, very distant, often inaudible, and at the same time similar to a heartbeat. No place for illusions here. The beat doesn't stop solitude, it doesn't cure pain, you can't telephone it--it's simply a reminder that you belong to a shared story." This is a beautiful, moving description of community, of human civilisation, of how we fit into our ecosystem, our rightful place in the world.

From Ursula K Le Guin's Guardian review of John Berger's new novel "From A to X: A Story in Letters."

--Julian

September

After a week of cloud, rain and crashing storms, the sun returned. Yesterday, the sky was a pale blue, mottled with ivory clouds.

Looking up I see
A plane, crow, and dragonfly
All the same size

At noon the heat rivalled midsummer, but by dusk it was cooler and unmistakably early autumn. Trilling evening cicadas had been replaced by the eerie whistle of other insects. Massed in the trees, the individual voices blend to a constant, piercing note that returns me to childhood: the urgent scream of a whistling kettle on the boil.

As dusk fell and the crows lined up neatly on the high pylon wires spanning the valley, a three-day-old moon brushed the horizon. An hour later it had disappeared.

--Julian

Garbled Prose, Garbled Thought

Here's a letter I wrote to the editor of the International Herald Tribune last week (they elected not to print it):

Garbled prose is often a sign of garbled thought.  Consider, for example, this sentence, from Thomas L. Friedman's column, "A Biblical Seven Years" (Views, Aug. 28): "Trying to build a democracy in Iraq, though, which I supported, was a war of choice and is unlikely to ever produce anything equal to its huge price tag."  It took me a few readings to figure out what Friedman, modifier dangling, was struggling to say here, and a few more readings to understand what had motivated him to create such an inelegant and ungrammatical sentence.  He wanted, it seems, to associate himself with "trying to build democracy in Iraq," which he says he supported, but to dissociate himself from the "war of choice" which, as long-time readers of his column will recall, he also supported.  As his odd sentence reminds us, Friedman suffered, and perhaps still suffers, from the the delusion that the invasion of Iraq was somehow equivalent to "trying to build democracy in Iraq."  Given what we knew in the run-up to the war Friedman has no excuse for having believed that in 2003, and in 2008 he should give up attempting to conceal behind sloppy syntax his serious error of judgment.

—David